


Infuriatingly Right

by hotnerd



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Character, Bisexual Female Character, Bisexual Female Character of Color, Bisexual Male Character, Bisexuality, Covens, Eventual Smut, Everyone is Bisexual, F/F, F/M, Family, Family Feels, Family Fluff, Femslash, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Magic, Multi, Nicholas Scratch is a soppy romantic, Other, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Prudence Night feels attraction as dislike, Romance, Sabrina Spellman is secretly a top, Sexual Tension, age differences are weird because everyone is immortal, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, coven feels, dark!Prudence, light!Prudence, magic shop au, mid-19th-century Britain sucked for black people, sounds bi i'm in
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 18:38:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16792510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotnerd/pseuds/hotnerd
Summary: Prudence is an It Girl with a dark past, Sabrina is a volunteering ray of sunshine, and Nick is a classical music & demonology nerd. Sexual tension, hate sex, love sex, bromance and eventual polyamory ensue. Ambrose just wanted a decent flatmate.Note: This work is on hold for now, but will be continued eventually! I love these three far too much to just let it sit unfinished forever.





	1. Prologue I: The Flatting Adventures of Sabrina

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is going to be a slightly dark, but ultimately very sweet Prudence/Sabrina/Nicholas love story. We might also have some Nick/Ambrose &/or Lucas/Ambrose in there eventually, too. 
> 
> Technically a College AU, in the broadest sense, but not all of the characters are currently attending university. In this world, magic is less of a deal-with-the-devil thing, and more of a Goddess worship & nature-focussed type deal, BUT with a mix of academic magic in there too alongside some wild magic & mythical creatures. Think the ethos of Kate Tiernan's Sweep/Wicca book series, but with the aesthetic & spellcasting style of 2018's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. I nonetheless included the Church of Night as a part of Prudence’s background.
> 
> The story is set in Cardiff, which for the purposes of this AU is the magical capital of Britain (mainly because I’m from Wales and New Zealand, and NZ didn’t seem like a very realistic setting for this fic.) Prudence is British Caribbean, Nicholas is Welsh and Sabrina is Irish. Nicholas's last name in this AU is Crafiad, meaning Scratch - I needed a Welsh Nick more than I needed air to breathe, and his name in the show is the most English thing in the whole world, so here we are. Croeso.
> 
> Another canon divergence is that in this fic, witches live for about 200-300 years maximum, rather than the indefinite amount of time implied by the TV show.
> 
> The first three chapters will be history/setup one-shots in each character's POV, followed by Story Time from Chapter Four onwards. Expect sexual tension, banter, eventual sex scenes, cute polyamory feels, lots of emotions, and people actually discussing feelings.
> 
> This work is un-betaed, so all mistakes are mine alone. This is the first fan fic I’ve written since 2011, so constructive criticism is very much appreciated! <3 Lots of love, please enjoy.
> 
> Rated Mature for now - will probably be Explicit in later chapters.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: Burnout, study fatigue, stress, breakups, grief.
> 
> This is the first of three chapters detailing how Sabrina, Prudence & Nicholas ended up in Cardiff in 2018.

Sabrina Spellman moved in with her cousin Ambrose a bit over a year ago, when she got fed up with halls and finally admitted that living with another witch would make life easier. Whilst sneaking off at night and returning at 3 or 4 am was par for the course for first-year university students, coming back covered in earth and/or blood was less expected, and harder to hide than a more traditional entanglement. There was also the issue of Salem to contend with; halls didn’t allow cats, even as service animals, and disguising him as a plushy toy whenever her floormates burst through the door without knocking was getting exhausting. 

Plus, Ambrose asked nicely, and she loved her cousin too much to say no. The warlock had a penchant for getting lost in his research for weeks at a time, and apparently having someone else around the house kept him both sane and fed. The issue being, of course, that magical flatmates don’t grow on trees. He’d tried attending a couple of local coven meetings, but even in Cardiff, magical capital of Britain, witches were secretive, and fairly entrenched in their family or historic homes. He tried flatting with a Kelpie for a little bit out of sheer desperation, but Cedric turned out to be an absolute nightmare, and the whole house was in danger of becoming permanently damp from his algae-covered presence.

Not long after, Sabrina walked into her room at 5 am, towelling her hair dry yet again, only to find Ambrose sitting on her bed, begging for a new flatmate. Despite his weak home invasion excuse — “I’m too busy to figure out how that mortal vocal projection works, cous, but this is urgent,” — she didn’t take much convincing.

Sabrina took more convincing to stay in the house when Ambrose realised just how busy she was studying both mortal university and magic full-time, and called an intervention with both their aunts. It took Aunt Zelda almost two hours to bully her into practicing both part-time instead. “You’re barely thirty, Sabrina! You have almost two hundred years to study mortal literature. Why in Goddess’s name are you risking your health for a poet who, frankly, wasn’t even that good in bed?” Afterwards, Aunt Hilda nodded sympathetically at her panicked “I have assignments due” spiel, tactfully knocked her out with a murmured spell, and left her to sleep off the stress hangover for a week and a half. She left Salem curled up on Sabrina’s chest, purring like a freight train.

It might just have been that she was too sleep-fogged to protest this infantilising treatment for three days after she woke, but by the time Sabrina was awake enough to be angry, she was also aware enough of the weight lifted that she couldn’t be. She was almost grateful for Hilda turning up at all her professors’ offices with wringing hands, explaining the terrible pneumonia Sabrina had contracted and liberally applying forged doctors’ notes to soothe the wounds. She was definitely grateful for Ambrose attending all her lectures for the time she was out. He wrote impressively detailed notes, scribbling corrections in the margins to the lecturer’s information about Shakespeare’s love life. (Apparently Ambrose’s grand-uncle had dated him, and he kept quite explicit diaries.)

If she was honest, Sabrina would have admitted that she was working so hard because it kept her from thinking. She and Harvey had only divorced a year ago, and grief still crept into every waking moment. But Ambrose conveniently didn’t ask for honesty, and after she talked to Aunt Hilda she had to admit that replacing grief with grief-tinged stress wasn’t really an improvement. So instead she pulled back, and slowly, infuriatingly, gave herself time to heal.

By the time thirty-five year old Sabrina reached her fourth year at university, she had settled into a comfortable pattern. Take one paper per semester; study magic three afternoons a week under Ambrose’s tutelage; cook dinners as payment for said tutelage; sneak off to shake collection buckets once or twice a week (under the guise of Tinder dates so Ambrose didn’t alert the Aunts for another intervention); delicately fend off actual date requests from mortals during charity work, whilst simultaneously collecting enough invitations to social events that she wouldn’t appear mysterious; feed Salem; sleep; repeat. It was a good life, if a bit lonely, but after the ten-year-long lesson in failed romance she knew better than to get too close to mortals. She’d tried meeting other witches, but the local covens were a bit too traditional for her taste, not to mention cliquey. And besides, she told herself; witches don’t fall in love often. One love ought to be good enough for a lifetime. As for real friends, she had her family and Dr. Cee.

So Sabrina the Witch drifted comfortably; bored, but content to trade excitement for safety. Besides, Ambrose’s experiments upstairs were explosive enough to keep their home life eventful.


	2. Prologue II: Queen of the Beast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: Depression, self-hate, descriptions of murder, racism, brief rape mention, implied rape, brainwashing, PTSD, intrusive thoughts, family estrangement. (Sorry, guys, this is the dark chapter, but I promise it gets lighter.)
> 
> An abridged history of Prudence.

Prudence Night was, in point of fact, a ruthless bitch. 

She first learned this at eight years old, when she marched into her father’s large dining room and furiously informed his nice, blond family that she, their half-sister, was the daughter of the sickly Caribbean maid they just fired. She learned it again at her Dark Baptism, when she used her full powers to kill the gang of rich Oxford boys who raped her sister the week before. 

The Ruthless Bitch moniker was set in stone when at eighteen, when she met her two other illegitimate half-sisters. The trio quickly realised that their Cambridge Dean father had deliberately hidden his warlock identity from his own blood, leaving his witch daughters in the dark about their heritage. Furious, they hunted out his address, and arrived, pretending that they’d never been adopted by the Church of Night. That night, the Weird Sisters met their maker in his office, and feigned having lost their untrained minds to their unknown gifts. Even then, he refused to admit that he had bastards.

The explosion of pure, malevolent rage they let loose snapped every neck in the house.

Fifteen years later, when Agatha and Dorcas uncovered the Church of Night’s real reason for adopting three afraid half-sisters, and for keeping them apart until after they were baptised, it was Prudence who poisoned the Queen of the Feast the night before her ascension. It was Prudence, at the back of the chapel, who clicked her fingers after all fifty elder attendees had eaten their fill. Prudence smiled in beat with her sisters as their silver tongues swelled. 

When Agatha, Dorcas and the other young Church of Night survivors looked to Prudence for guidance, she led them straight to Cardiff, to start a new coven. It was only after they started un-learning the twisted morality the High Preist Faustus had taught them, that Prudence realised she had no idea how to lead in peace-time. 

Three years after the move, a younger warlock with a good heart and a clear head challenged her authority. Naturally, she duelled him first, won, then engaged in hot and very inventive hate-sex (a witch has certain needs, after all). But afterwards she quietly admitted that he had a point.

“All my life I’ve needed to be harsh, lover. I don’t know how to be kind. I don’t think many of us do. If you can turn us from converts back into witches, you have my blessing.”

Prudence honestly hadn’t thought it would work, but it did. Lucas sought out the other local covens, who agreed to send emissaries to the new coven. They had unofficially dubbed themselves the “Circle of Light”. Prudence thought the name was tacky in the extreme, but handing over the reins of power meant letting certain things slide. 

The new magic, rules and morality they learned felt better; it was more logical, and truer to their experience of the power in their blood. Even their ice queen ex-leader felt it, but it had also never been clearer to Prudence exactly the kind of monster the Church had moulded her into. 

The twisted thoughts that she’d always secretly known were wrong, even as her Church mentors encouraged them, grew stronger at each meeting; the more she fought them, the more they pressed into her head like the talons of an angry demon. When Agatha and Dorcas found her trapped in a magical bind on the floor of their run-down flat, screaming, they called for a healer, who summoned a demonologist, who requested help from a werewolf with a PhD in psychology, who eventually uncovered the issue. Prudence’s brain was attacking her, and as the witch had never been taught to disconnect her magical actions from her emotions, her magic had likewise seen fit to attack its host. She wasn’t a danger to anyone else, but without drastic help she wouldn't last much longer.

—————

So it came about that in 1987 Prudence Night, looking not a day older than eighteen, knocked on the door of the only sister she actually grew up with. She had nothing to lose, after all.

Before the Church of Night convinced her to cut ties with her only remaining family at eighteen, Prudence and Honour had hid nothing from each other. Honour had known Pru was a witch, and for all their care home’s catholic teachings, had never believed she was a demon. However at the time, neither of them knew what being a witch entailed on the ageing front. So Prudence telephoned her older sister the week before she visited, hoping that with forewarning her youthful appearance might come as less of a shock. 

Honour took her enduring youth pretty well actually. What Prudence had failed to consider was that her sister would have aged.

Honour was… she had to count for a moment. Forty-one. She had curly salt-and-pepper hair and a slight limp. Prudence was relieved to notice crow’s feet and laugh-lines, but there were also worryingly deep frown lines on her forehead. She looked quite young for forty, really, but a hell of a lot older than she had at eighteen. Prudence’s catholic upbringing whispered to her that she was also dressing like what mortals called a “dyke” - dark blue overalls covered her full hips, and she wore the curly hair they shared cropped close to her scalp.

After a very tense three hour long explanation of Prudence’s brainwashing by a magical cult, multiple murders, escape, mental breakdown and subsequent countdown to death, Honour was frowning. Prudence held her breath.

“So you’re saying that my baby sister is technically immortal, but I’m going to outlive her?” Honour asked.

“If you live past six months, which I hope you do, then yes.” Pru fidgeted awkwardly, refusing to look up. Did Honour miss the part with the murders?

The room was silent for several long years. She could feel Honour’s calculating gaze on her forehead as her sister exhaled. Then a gentle hand tilted her chin up.

“Then I think we should skip straight to the ‘I forgive you’ bit, yeah?” Honour met her eyes.

Prudence flinched. “Really?”

“Of course.” Honour's eyes hardened, but her gaze didn’t waver. “The things they did to you were wrong, but they weren't your fault. You should have been our Pru, not a murder weapon.” Her gaze softened. "I knew it wasn't like you to leave me, you know. I never stopped looking for you."

Prudence let out a breath she had held since 1962, but never noticed until that moment. She lunged forward to wrap her arms fiercely around Honour’s neck, but her sister was already there to meet her.

———————

Things got easier after that. For one thing, Prudence didn’t die. 

It turned out Honour, fully aware that magic existed and on a hunt for her lost sister, had befriended a variety of creatures and spent most of her adult years involved with Britain’s magical community. But unlike most magical Brits, she remembered every story of the British West Indies her mother had told her from the ages of three to fourteen, and assumed correctly that Witch Doctors were both real witches, and real doctors. She had met a couple who moved to Britain in 1956 to service the growing Caribbean population there, and put them in contact with Prudence. “Yuh wa sum Caribbean healing gyal,” she joked when she first suggested it, imitating their mother’s accent.

The healing worked, but the methods weren’t what Prudence had expected. Yes, there were spells involved - disenchantments, tinctures, a woven charm to be worn next to her heart for six months - but at the same time, Prudence had a list of very non-magical tasks to complete. The no-nonsense healer Honour ushered into the flat Prudence shared with Agatha and Dorcas in Cardiff explained that Prudence’s magic was tied to her emotions, so the magical cure wouldn’t stick unless her emotional state was likewise cured.

And thus it was that Prudence Night, self-proclaimed ruthless bitch, went to therapy.

Firstly, she had to atone not only to Honour, but to Agatha and Dorcas, at whom she had directed a lot of impotent rage over the years. The healer presided over several sessions with each person she loved, or merely liked enough to care about, over the course of several months. Every time Prudence saw one of her sisters truly forgive her, the claws in her scalp loosened.

Forgiving herself was much harder, but Prudence set to it with the same single-minded determination she used on spellcasting. The process was like chasing her own damn tail. The closest thing to a win she had was forgiving herself for not having forgiven herself yet; but somehow, even that made her feel lighter.

Other things worked too. Like seeing Honour swimming with her selkie girlfriend, happy and shielded from prying eyes by Prudence’s wards. There were meetings with the slowly healing coven, when they tried casting new, comfortable spells; circles of protection anchored by salt rather than blood, fertility spells for their garden, scrying spells in water bowls. Praying not to the Dark Lord, but to the Goddess; not for the first time, when it was awkward, but the fifteenth, when it began to feel natural, and Prudence’s mind felt still, clear and refreshed.

Eventually, Prudence decided to pick a new surname. She had been baptised Prudence Night, but the Church of Night was dead, and the name should die with it. At first, she considered Thomas, the surname assigned to her mother as a freed slave, and the one used by her sister now; but that just felt like trading in one oppressor for another. No, her witch name needed to mean freedom; to acknowledge her history, but not to be ruled by it.

Goddess, that was a lot to ask of a name.

Eventually, she gave up, and asked Honour to name her. It felt right. "As long as it's not ridiculous; I'm not that sentimental." She warned darkly.

The next time they met for dinner, she already knew Honour had figured it out from her barely concealed grin. "Black." She chuckled darkly. "Like your past, your humour, and our skin." She sobered, but her eyes still twinkled. "I want you to wear it all with pride." 

It took almost ten years of training, but the witch-doctor eventually declared that Prudence Black was no longer in danger of her sickness returning. Prudence’s biggest fear, that she wouldn’t know herself afterwards, didn’t come to fruition; she was still judgemental, often insulting, snappy, witty, prideful, and voraciously clever. She was still a bitch; she liked being a bitch. Bitches stood up for themselves.

What she had learned not to be, was ruthless.


End file.
